What is the UGC or User Generate Content section? Why is it important

We have been talking about ugc blogs, ugc section at different classes. So what is UGC or User Generated Content and why is it important for SEO and web marketing.

Let’s take blog for that matter. At Jeetbo.com we have a blog http://www.jeetbo.com/blog and we want to encourage our community members to do blog posts. Now lets see the pros and cons for allowing community guest blog posts:

Pros of UGC blog:

1. More content will be added to the site. More content means better stuff for search engine. More topics (and thus more keywords) covered.
2. Community will feel empowered. They may bring in more people to see their blog posts. Also it becomes a great platform for community members to get recognition.
3. Some of the content can be really good and adding a new dimension to the blog and the website.
4. Very cost effective and content profitable.
5. Many many other advantages

Cons of UGC blog:

1. Some of the content may not be good and the readers may get annoyed at low quality posts and may leave your blog.
2. There can be too many blog posts that your readers may not like to browse every day, they want your expertize, pristine things. They don’t to community to others as they are here for your blog and your posts.
3. Moderating the posts can be a pain.

When you consider the pros and cons, the pro list it really long and the biggest con is readers getting annoyed. So how do we plan to solve it.

Solving the Cons for UGC blog

You create another blog for UGC and then have your community post it and you keep it different from main blog. The disadvantages here are:

1. Community is not motivated to write the blog posts as less people will be seeing it.
2. You may not value some of the really high quality blog posts and put it under UGC

Solution to the above two problems:

1. You allow the users to put their links and bio,
2. Putting a weekly integration post from UGC to main blog with your comments on it so that more people can visit the UGC
3. Shifting high quality UGC blog to main blog with a special appreciation note.
4. Making high quality authors of UGC authors to the main blog too

UGC blog and for that matter any User Generated content is a power tool for web marketing. Implementing it can be a little tricky to add simplicity to management. I advice to have one blog with different URL structure + some small settings. I will be teaching this in my next class.

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